Quotations on language, some good, some not. Decide for yourself

"Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"In the game known as Broken Telephone (or Chinese Whispers) a child whispers a phrase into the ear of a second child, who whispers it into the ear of a third child, and so one. Distortions accumulate, and when the last child announces the phrase, it is comically different from the original. The game works because each child does not merely degrade the phrase, which would culminate in a mumble, but reanalyzes it, making a best guess about the words the preceding child had in mind."
....."All languages change through the centuries. Today we do not speak like Shakespeare (1564-1616), who did not speak like Chaucer (1343-1400), who did not speak like the author of Beowulf (around 750-800). As the changes take place, people feel the ground eroding under their feet and in every era have predicted the imminent demise of the language. Yet the twelve hundred years of changes since Beowulf have not left us grunting like Tarzan, and that is because language change is a game of Broken Telephone."
....."A generation of speakers uses their lexicon and grammar to produce sentences. The younger generation listens to the sentences and tries to infer the lexicon and grammar, the remarkable feat we call language acquisition. The transmission of a lexicon and grammar in language acquisition is fairly high in fidelity - you probably can communicate well with your parents and your children - but it is never perfect."
....."Words rise and fall in popularity, as the needs of daily life change, and also as the hip try to sound different from the dweebs and graybeards. Speakers swallow or warp some sounds to save effort, and enunciate or shift others to make themselves understood. Immigrants or conquerors with regional or foreign accents may swamp the locals and change the pool of speech available to children."
....."Children, for their part, do not mimic sentences like parrots but try to make sense of them in terms of underlying words and rules. They may hear a mumbled consonant as no consonant at all, or a drawn-out or mispronounced vowel as a different vowel. They may fail to discern the rationale for a rule and simply memorize its outputs as a list. Or they may latch on to some habitual way of ordering words and hypothesize a new rule to make sense of it."
....."The language of their generation will have changed, though it need not have deteriorated. Then the process is repeated with their children. Each change may be small, but as changes accumulate over centuries they reshape the language just as erosion and sedimentation imperceptibly sculpt the earth."
- Steven Pinker

"The fun of Pinker's game (see above) is forever destroyed by simply changing the rules so that instead of whispering the sentence to the next person we write it on a slip of paper (or a computer screen) and hand it along. Now there is no room for interpretation or creativity. Yet that may be the direction we are heading."
....."Since the invention of the printing press, and the rise of the "scientific" mindset, there has been an increased valuing of precision and repetition. A world that once valued the teller-of-tales who was free to reformulate and personalize the narrative he or she received from another, is becoming a world that values the quoter of quotes, and we better be exact, and include the proper citation, too."
....."Related to that general movement from an oral to a mathematical base for communication are two other dynamics. As Pinker notes, the forces of generations and physical distance and cultural identity were instrumental in fomenting the very brokenness which made language live. These forces also are increasingly limited in their impact as it becomes more difficult to "recognize to old folks" so we can rebel against them, or lay claim to a certain place or group in order to adopt and develop our own unique language."
....."When we can converse instantly around the world, with little sense of who is on the other end of the conversation, the push toward one, systematic, universally understood language becomes very strong. We seem to be in danger of destroying the very forces that make for a living language. What will that do to the patterns of thought and imagination that depend upon that flexibility and variability for their existence? Perhaps precision kills language after all."
- Alan Selig

"The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language."
- Henri Delacroix
"Language which makes communication possible is also the construct which prevent us from having a pure experience with the Source. Language serves as an intermediary between the pure 'bubble of information' that floats down to us from the source and the finite minds at various levels of consciousness which struggle to interpret and comprehend that information."
......"In fact, there is a direct correlation between the degree of structure in the language and the degree of structure in the society which speaks it. The words of language, as they are written or spoken, play a defining role in the mechanism of thought. They become another 'filter of consciousness' interposed between the purity of the message and it's interpretation. The physical representations of the elements of thought as expressed by language become the attempts of a finite mind to make sense out of infinite images."
- Ellen Mogensen (reversing Albert Einstein's quote to the contrary)

"Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once."
- Johann Lavater

"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
- Benjamin Lee Whorf

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Even now as you are speaking to me, are the words you are thinking in our language or in theirs?"
- Kret to Jet-Laya ("Star Trek: Voyager"), his Kobali daughter previously known as Ensign Lyndsay Ballard (demonstrating the well known phenomena that the language of thought is the primary language of the individual -EM)

"To have another language is to possess a second soul."
- Charlemagne

"Language is the inventory of human experience."
- L. W. Lockhart

"Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place."
- John French

"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."
- Noam Chomsky

"Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Language is the blood of the soul
into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent."
- Ferdinand De Saussure

"Britain and America: two great countries divided by a common language."
- Winston Churchill

"Look at the... deterioration which our Queen's English has undergone at the hands of the Americans! Look at those phrases which so annoy us in their books and speeches, at their reckless exaggeration and contempt for congruity!"
- Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury (1863)

"The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest."
- Cyril Connolly

"The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes."
- Njabulo Ndebele

"'The fact that any alien race communicates with another is quite remarkable' Troi says as she lifts Picard's clear glass cup filled with coffee from his desk. 'We are stranded on a planet. No language in common but I want to teach you mine.' Troi points to the cup and says 'S'smarith... what did I just say?' Picard answers 'Cup? Glass?' Troi asks 'Are you sure? I might have meant liquid, clear, brown, hot. And we conceptualize the universe in the same way.'" (Communication is much harder when the two parties do not - EM)
- Troi to Picard ("Star Trek: Next Generation")

"Legal language enshrouds the law, hiding it from the public it exists to serve. The idiom of the lawyer leads to public ignorance of the content of the law (which paradoxically refuses to recognize that ignorance of the law should be a defence), to uninformed criticism and to unmerited praise. It provokes the indifference of too many laymen towards the law and the contempt of litigants for a system they do not understand."(See what it mean to conceptualize the universe the same way? - EM)
- David Pannick

"The future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity. About diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them. About pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right". About making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not 'packaging' them. Perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors."
- Rick Levine ("The End of Business as Usual")

"Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true."
- Charles Dickens

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others."
- Anthony Robbins

"How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote."
- Anonymous